So many good things to find here: A Complete History of the Millennium Falcon, exhaustively researched and illustrated. This is my favorite spaceship design, and what taught me at an early age that careful asymmetry was an excellent design choice.
Here are some crappy cellphone shots of my kick panels. The driver’s side was patched crudely before I got the truck, but the passenger’s side has always been swiss cheesy. I think I’ll wait for warm weather, take the angle grinder to both sides, and hit them with some rust encapsulator. One of my goals for this year is to get a decent welding rig and start practicing again so that I can take some smaller repair projects on; this would be a good one.
Driver’s side
Passenger’s side. Interesting to see the original gold paint there, isn’t it?
In other news, a printing vendor I use at work had a special on circle-cut stickers last week. I’ve been noodling with a design for our ad-hoc Maryland IH group, called Old Line State Binders, but I was having a hard time nailing down a design incorporating the Maryland flag. It’s a great flag but very visually busy, and in the last year there’s been a glut of shape-plus-flag stickers out there: a crab, deer, dogs, mustaches, etc.
My original idea was to use something ubiquitous to vintage 4-wheel-drive trucks: the locking hub. That part was pretty easy to nail down, and I took away some of the visual clutter to clean up the image. Integrating the flag and the name was the hard part. In order to keep the design circular (and get my cheap stickers before the deal expired), I left out the name and went with the following design:
Eventually I’ll figure out how the rest of the design should look. If you’d like a couple, drop me a line and I’ll send you one when I get them.
I’ve been really quiet on the Scout front for the last year or so due to work and family commitments. I haven’t visited the Binder Planet in ages. I’m hoping to get some time in the spring to organize a meeting and get back in touch with people.
I spend a lot of time in Photoshop trying to automate repetitive tasks. Here’s a great Introduction To Photoshop Scripting, using Javascript to handle complex tasks not possible with standard Actions.
Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was “good enough.”
From The Truth About Cars, a great article about the VW Harlequin (1996 Golf).
At its core, the Golf Harlequin was, quite simply, a multi-colored Volkswagen Golf manufactured only for the 1996 model year. But, like most things in the car world – and everything in the Volkswagen world – there’s a lot more to it than that.
I took a little downtime before the snow flew the other day to run up the Scout, do a few errands, and slip my rollbar pads on. They fit really well! So well, in fact, that I dusted off a pair of inserts I had up in the rafters of the garage and put them in for old time’s sake. These are the originals from Chewbacca so the passenger’s side is cracked where a protruding bolt head made it impossible to slide between the bar and the window. Luckily, I’ve got another good set covered in red river dust waiting to be cleaned up.
On the Binder Planet, a member called 540fan built a bumper based on the plans Brian and I developed, and it turned out really well. One thing I really like about his setup is how he handled the swingarm stop—an elegant and simple plate welded to the top right side prevents the swingarm from going past 180°. He also mounted his Hi-Lift on the backside of the triangle below the spare instead of the face of the bumper, so he was able to add a couple of clevis mounts to the face. It looks like his hinge pin mount is different as well; I think he may have welded it directly to the face of the bumper instead of adding standoffs. Overall, it looks great and I’m happy I was able to help lay some groundwork.
A couple of weeks ago, Bennett let the local Scout group know that there was a celebration of life scheduled for our friend Alan, and I was sure to put it on the calendar. We met up at a seafood restaurant outside of Laurel and I walked in about two minutes before him. Alan’s family had a private room set up in back and we introduced ourselves to his sister and brother in law, who were lovely and introduced us around. We were joined by John B. and his wife, and later Ray and his family stopped in; we spent the next two hours swapping stories and catching up. I met Alan’s dad and told him the story of when I first got Peer Pressure and couldn’t sort out the throttle linkage: Alan immediately contacted me to tell me the part I had was for an automatic, and sent me the correct part that week. I said that only Alan would know that, and only Alan would have the part sitting in his stash. His dad seemed to appreciate that story, because he got a little misty. On the wall behind us a slideshow was playing, full of pictures from his early life and a bunch of scouting adventures. There were a few pictures where we realized that several of the subjects were gone, and that was a little sobering. We’re not getting any younger.
As usual, the Scout guys were the last to leave. I said my goodbyes and fired up the truck; the heat blew warm and the engine was full of life. I said some quiet thanks to the Sky Pilot and pointed toward home.
Spurred on by an Instagram post by another Scouter/designer, I got off my ass on Tuesday and finished building out a set of Scout II grille designs I started sometime last year. I put them up on Wednesday and got the highest number of likes on any post all year. It hasn’t translated to millions yet, but I’m hopeful that when I post the second set—Scout 80/800 grilles—I’ll get some more eyeballs, and maybe some more sales.
I saw this picture in a series from a parts truck listing online and grabbed it. The typeface is perfect; everything about this is perfect, except for the extra apostrophe.
Two years ago, I designed a shirt using the face of the transfer case shift knob, and thought about printing some T-shirts to sell. I had a test print made and wore it to Nationals last year. A Scout vendor who attended the same show released a version of that shirt on their Instagram feed this spring. I’d also designed a series showing the grille faces from all iterations of the Scout II and set it aside because…life; they released a similar T-shirt design this summer.
For some reason, this really got to me. I should be making some money on my ideas. Several things were holding me back: I didn’t have anyplace to host the designs (I didn’t want them on my personal sites), I’m wary of the copyright issues around the IH trademark, and I didn’t want to be seen as a copycat. But it stuck in my craw.
The other night I saw a post by another Scout owner in Austin selling her own T-shirt designs and decided I just needed to pull the trigger: if they can do it so can I, and I figure my designs will look better. I bought the domain Oldlinestatebinders.com for $7 and I’ll be using that for a website and an Instagram feed, and I’ll use one of the T-shirt fulfillment vendors online for a while and see how things go. So far I’ve got the 4-wheel drive design, the T-19 shift pattern, the Oldlinestatebinders logo, and a series of grille designs almost ready to go. I figure some careful social media work might generate a little extra cash.
I’ve mentioned many times before how much of a LEGO geek I was back in the day; this article on the UX of LEGO panels activates about seventeen different parts of my brain. I always had a collection of “special” parts that were key to any build with a minifig, and these were at the top of the list.
